Grapes, Sour or Sweet, Are Ripe for Dessert

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Grapes caramelized in honey and wine make a sweet-tart topping for yogurt ice creamCreditAndrew Scrivani for The New York Times

By Yotam Ottolenghi

Oct. 13, 2017

The grapevine is one of the oldest plants in cultivation, and grapes are still the world’s largest fruit crop. Much of it goes into the rich and various world of winemaking. But, for all my delight in drinking wine, here I’m writing about the grapes that I use in the kitchen.

Luckily, the characteristics that make wine so complex — they can be tart, sweet, fresh, earthy and fruity — also come into play when cooking and baking with grapes. There are times when the distinction between wine grapes and kitchen grapes is pleasantly blurred and a recipe calls for the use of both.

Grapes don’t continue to ripen once picked, so they stay as sour or as sweet as when they’re harvested. Taste an unripe grape, and it will be mouth-puckeringly sour. Leave that same grape on the vine in the sun, and it will become incomparably sweet. The joy, though, is how much can be done with grapes in the kitchen at both ends of the spectrum, whether they’re left whole or turned into juice or syrup to be bottled.

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Black grapes, such as Concords, have dark purple-blue skin and a powdery white film called ‘bloom.’CreditAndrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I first experienced the power of unripe grapes a few years ago in Istanbul. I was spending the day with Musa Dagdeviren, a wonderfully inspiring chef. Musa’s mission is to reconnect those who eat at one of his restaurants in the modern city with traditional food from the land. In that tradition, meat is often paired with a tart fruit like sour cherries, green plums or unripe grapes. This is the food many people in Turkey grew up eating; reports of diners starting to cry as memories of their grandmothers’ cooking flood back follow Musa around.

With tissues in my pocket just in case, we drove out of town at dawn one morning, heading east to Musa’s small farm. We arrived just as his zucchini flowers were opening up with the morning sun. At the base of the pot the flowers were to be cooked in, Musa placed layers of grape leaves, sliced tomatoes, fresh mint and parsley, some kaymak (a Turkish product similar to clotted cream) and a small bunch or two of unripe grapes. After baking, the sharpness released from the grapes had suffused everything with an irresistible contrast of tart and richness. I didn’t cry, but, standing on the soil where grapevines have grown for so many centuries, I felt a real connection between food and place, history and memory. Grapes were a small part of this big dish, but their impact felt large and timeless.

Back in my test kitchen in London, I’m sadly not within reach of a plot of grapevines. I am, however, in possession of verjuice, an ingredient sold in specialty stores that is made from semi-ripe grapes. Verjuice allows me to experience the richness of unripe grapes in a bottled form. It’s an ancient ingredient, used in the fruity, sweet-sour, spiced style of European cooking in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. Later, when lemons, and then tomatoes, became available to add acidity to food, verjuice was rather knocked off the radar. It is now experiencing a revival in dressings and sauces, since it has the tartness of lemon juice and the acidity of vinegar without the sharpness of either.

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Roasting grapes in wine brings out all the flavors of the fruitCreditAndrew Scrivani for The New York Times

On the other end of the spectrum are grapes at their ripest and sweetest. As with unripe grapes, these can be used in the kitchen either whole, as they are, or else juiced or turned into syrup to be bottled.

Grape syrup — pekmez — is another Turkish ingredient, a sweet molasseslike syrup made from cooking down juice from ripe grapes until it is thick and dark and wonderfully intense, like the date syrup I grew up on. As is common throughout Turkey and the Middle East, I like to drizzle pekmez on toast covered with a thick layer of tahini paste; it’s much like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Finally, there are uses for sweet, ripe grapes: bringing a pop of juicy freshness to a chicken salad, for example, or pushed into the top of an oil-enriched bread dough. This fruit-topped bread, schiacciata, is an absolute favorite of mine and very much part of my food memory bank. Eating it takes me straight back to family holidays in Italy, when we used to eat it for breakfast.

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Based on Italian schiacciata, this flatbread has a jammy grape topping to stand up to Gorgonzola and fresh thymeCreditAndrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Ripe grapes can be roasted to concentrate their flavor. Adding sweet wine and honey to the pan, as we do here to make a topping for ice cream, adds a caramelized dimension. Muscat wine tastes just the like the sweet and floral muscat grapes that produce it. Using it in a recipe with fresh grapes feels like ancient alchemy.

I also like to perfume the grapes with sugar, vinegar and spices before they are roasted, chargrilled or oven-dried. Intensifying the grape’s sweetness in this way turns them into the sweet-sharp flavor bombs they are, ready for their juice to burst and stain to form another permanent memory.